Where to set user specific environments?

[Hadmut Danisch]

On Wed, Jun 28, 2006 at 03:22:57PM +0200, Nikolas Arend wrote:

> What kind 
> of "specific environment settings" would you like to adjust? Environment 
> variables?



The usual things someone puts in .login (when using tcsh) or .profile
or xsession, and which have to be handed down to all processes of the
session.

E.g. plenty of environment variables, umask, history settings and
things like that.











> On startup, xfce runs /etc/xdg/xfce4/xinitrc (if there's no 
> xinitrc in ~/.config/xfce/). I'm not sure what exactly you're trying to 
> do, but copying /etc/xdg/xfce4/xinitrc to ~/.config/xfce/ and doing your 
> modifications in there might be what you're looking for.



That would probably work, but would be an ugly workaround, not a
solution. 

- It highly depends on the distribution and the xfce version. You'd
  have to continuously change and update that file

- You can't have one account to login to machines with different
  versions of xfce or different distributions.

- It moves things into the users reponsibility which don't belong there

- Too much overhead.

- It would work with xfce only. I'd prefer a file which works with any
  kind of login, like ssh, console, fvwm, gnome, kde, xfce. Thus, no
  desktop-specific things are to be included.



What needs to be done is something like

if [ -e $HOME/.xfcerc ]; then 
. $HOME/.xfcerc
fi


and then you can put things like

umask 027
limit coredumpsize
export FOOBAR=something


into that file.



I tried to use xfce, but most of my scripts and programs don't work
since they depend on a bunch of environment variables. No way to set
them under xfce?






regards
Hadmut